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mattgerstman

215 karma · joined March 17, 2015

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mattgerstman··on 98.css
This is even more impressive knowing that its artisanal code, or as we called it back then, code.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Thanks so much for all the feedback! I'm signing off from answering comments.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
When you get a chance give this post a read, we're investing in our personal users now more than ever. The features we've announced are just the beginning.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Thanks so much. We love to share how we build things with the tech community and we know the tradeoffs when we post them.

We're just a bunch of people doing our best to do right by our users.

mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Thanks for the kind words. I'm not at all responsible for this, but I'll pass it on to our sync team.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Honestly just use GitHub. My (high level) understanding of sync is file system issues file event for every file change, we receive it, determine if its relevant, and then make the appropriate delta. You can imagine with thousands (or millions) of small files this becomes nearly impossible to manage with an OS integrated sync engine.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
FWIW I've passed this note along to our sync team but I don't have a ton of insight here.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Thanks so much!
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Thanks so much! I had the realization recently that we don't talk a lot about what engineers do outside of writing code and the Plus launch was the perfect narrative to talk about it.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
We do use storybook! We have an internal design system called DIG that may eventually be shared more publicly. Each individual feature gets a "product component library" which is a way to rapidly build components on top of DIG.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Thanks, we love paper too!
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Thanks so much! We're very excited about our roadmap.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
This should be substantially better since we shipped our new sync engine

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Click the dropbox icon, click your avatar, preferences, notifications for most in app notifications.

TBH the whole point of Basic is to be a trial sku so I don't know if you can turn those off. We do want you to become a paying customer :D

mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
I'm not totally informed on this subject, but I do know our sync team is hiring :)
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
It's important to note that many of these companies are operating under different constraints than us.

Bigger companies are able to reduce the price of storage based on it's value to other features.

Some companies make storage cheaper by going through your data and/or selling it, this goes against our values and we won't do it.

mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Yep this is it. We need to provide more than just storage to succeed in the marketplace.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
API-QL is essentially a glue layer to make our internal interface, Stone, play nicely with Apollo. We might open source some pieces of it, but the vast majority of it is code generation for very specific Dropbox use cases.

https://github.com/dropbox/stone

mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
We get it. The simple truth is we need to provide more than just storage to succeed in the marketplace. We rewrote our sync engine recently to make things much more performant and we're working on shipping more value to users with fewer upsells.

https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...

FWIW you can turn off all the notifications in the preference panel.

mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
This is definitely something we're talking about. We're aware there are a set of users who want just sync and we're figuring out how to ship that while making our other features discoverable.
mattgerstman··on The software engineering lifecycle: How we built the new Dropbox Plus
Author here, happy to answer any questions about how we build products at Dropbox.
mattgerstman··on Introduction to Web Development (2018)
I wish all courses were this thorough! Thanks Mr Holt!